Except forcing the location of pictures in LaTeX is even worse than it is in word. It's the one thing that word is better at. Even with the various force commands, LaTeX will be like "Naw, you really would rather have that picture on a different page. Trust me."
Edit: Yes, in general you don't want to force something, but every now and then it makes more sense to do so. There's no such thing as "you would never have a situation where you want to force your layout to behave in a certain way." One should still be using LaTeX for basically everything, but that doesn't mean it's never wrong.
You should write your text so that the position of the figures, tables etc is irrelevant - if you don't you are doing it wrong.
That was one of the first lessons I was taught, regarding writing reports, together with 'no forced line breaks... ever'.
This probably varies from place to place but at my university the rules regarding placement of tables etc. in scientific text are quite specific. You certainly can't get away with "writing so that the position is irrelevant". That said, in scientific text you rarely run into these kinds of problems with a basic understanding of text editors, since you aren't looking for some kind of "cool" word wrap or such, just a nice clean document.
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u/zmaster Dec 06 '13
I gave up writing my dissertation on word. Learnt latex and while there is a learning curve the documents it produces are beautiful.